Rape and racism

If you are an Indian male, are you automatically held in suspicion as a potential rapist? If you go by the rationale of a professor in a German university, all Indian men are rapists-in-the-making.

The professor, Dr Annette G Beck-Sickinger, head of the biochemistry department in Leipzig University, refused an internship to an Indian student saying, “I don’t accept any Indian male students for internships. We hear a lot about the rape problem in India … I have many female students in my group, so I think this attitude is something I cannot support.”

Beck-Sickinger’s comments on why she refused internship to the student provoked widespread outrage, and not only in India. The German ambassador to India, Michael Steiner, sent a strong-worded reprimand to Beck-Sickinger: “Your oversimplifying and discriminating generalisation is an offence to furthering women empowerment in India, and it is an offence to millions of law-abiding, tolerant, open-minded and hard-working Indians. Let’s be clear: India is not a country of rapists.”

Suitably chastised, Beck-Sickinger was quick to tender an apology: “I made a mistake. I sincerely apologise to everyone whose feelings I’ve hurt.” However, the ugly incident shows that racist pride and prejudice, even in the most educated of people, still hold sway in an increasingly globalised world.

It is deeply ironic in particular that a German would make all Indian men collectively culpable of rape. Long after World War II and the Nuremberg trails which convicted Nazi war criminals for crimes against humanity, Germans were made to suffer the burden of ‘collective responsibility’ for the Holocaust that took the lives of seven million people, mainly Jews. The stigma of ‘collective responsibility’ haunted an entire generation of Germans, who were made to feel guilty for the atrocities committed by the Nazi leadership.

While Germans no longer bear the weight of ‘collective responsibility’ of Hitler’s regime, racial stereotyping is on the increase in many forms and guises. At airport security counters in the Western world, any dark-skinned person with a Muslim-sounding name is far more likely to be pulled up for a so-called ‘random’ body-search than a Caucasian. By implication, all Asians, particularly Muslim Asians, are deemed to be potential terrorists.

America and Americans too are subject to racial stereotyping, particularly after a series of recent incidents where white local US law enforcement authorities used undue force, sometimes with fatal results, against Afro-Americans. One such case involved a middle-aged Indian, a recent arrival in country whose only ‘crime’ was his inability to speak English, which caused him to be assaulted by a police officer and suffer partial paralysis as a result.

So should all white Americans be clubbed together as xenophobic, violent racists? Obviously not. But instances of police brutality will inevitably be trotted out by many to accuse the US of being a nation of racists.

The unpalatable truth is that all of us carry the mental baggage of racial prejudice with us wherever we go. When we accuse others of racial profiling we must also hold ourselves liable to be guilty of the same charge. If for no other reason than our belief that everyone else is racist, except us – which is perhaps the most racist belief of all.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Author

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. He also writes the script for three cartoon strips. Two are in collaboration with Ajit Ninan, Like That Only which appears twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday and Power Point which appears on the Edit page of Times of India every Thursday. He also does a joint daily cartoon strip which appears online in collaboration with Partho Sengupta. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative.

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, a. . .